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“... claim for Isherwood’s writing, praising only, in his extensive descriptions of the work, the Berlin stories, the novel A Single Man, and the polemical autobiography Christopher and His Kind. He examines the writing for film, but thinks it unimportant. Isherwood, who disliked self-revelation, was not a fluent or eloquent letter writer. Although he was a ...”

“... triggered the deportations in place after place and who was assassinated by an Armenian in Berlin in 1921; and Djemal Pasha, high military commander and mayor of Istanbul, where it all began with the mass arrests and executions of Armenian leaders on 23-24 April 1915. I realise, however, that an author whom I greatly admired at the age of 12, and whose ...”

“... a spell as Auden and Isherwood’s ambassador in London, he resented Isherwood’s use of their Berlin years in his fiction, stories that challenged Spender’s sexual caginess. In the name-dropper’s way, it was his friends’ growing reputations that Spender found most invigorating, and the work was treated by him merely as a diplomatic passport to their ...”

“... was five and not in the direct line of succession. Finding himself at the age of 41 seated on Edward I’s coronation chair in Westminster Abbey amid ‘the red, the gold, the gilt, the grandeur’, he was full of nerves and foreboding. ‘This is absolutely terrible,’ he wrote with engaging candour to his cousin. ‘I’m only a naval officer, it’s ...”

“... a bit player in his own epic. We see him as a 15-year-old with his sister on a winter afternoon in Berlin on the day that Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany. Next he is a partisan in the Spanish Civil War. He is present in Moscow in 1957, ‘shocked’ to see that the embalmed Stalin was ‘so tiny and yet so all-powerful’. He is part of ‘the attentive ...”

“... her book. There were also the ambiguously situated onlookers (maybe participants too?) like Isaiah Berlin and one or two others, in addition to some of the people now gathered around the New York Review of Books. What is remarkable about the list of names she spools out is not only their number and even distinction (Robert Lowell, Jackson ...”

“... The same could not be said of the two alternatives for the Premiership, Neville Chamberlain and Edward Halifax. ‘I was never meant to be a War Minister,’ Chamberlain told his sisters in October 1939, whereas Winston was ‘enjoying every moment of the war’. As for Lord Halifax, no shrinking violet in political argument, the thought of being a war ...”

“... elite schools: the progressive Minta gymnasium alone produced Szilárd and his fellow physicists Edward Teller (who rejoiced in the initials E.T.) and Nicholas Kurti, the engineer Theodore von Kármán, and the economists Nicholas Kaldor and Thomas Balogh. They were overwhelmingly Jewish or from a Jewish background. Almost all were non-observant, some ...”

“... form of literary and ideological imperialism visited on the Balkans. While consciously drawing on Edward Said’s Orientalism for inspiration, Todorova makes clear distinctions between Said’s consideration of the Middle East and her own of what used to be called the Near East. Both authors draw on a third academic, Milica Bakic-Hayden, to describe the ...”

“... word-play. In 1930 Auden was a 23-year-old Oxford graduate, recently returned from a year in Berlin, who had finally had his first collection of poems accepted by Faber. He was a young man beginning to make his mark on the world; he was discovering his voice, and his role. He had decided to become a teacher. Auden taught full-time for five years, from ...”

“... The Austrian government in Vienna resolved to serve an ultimatum on its Serbian neighbour. Berlin promised support for Austria on 5 July. Encouraged by Paris, Russia opted to defend its Serbian client by mobilising against Austria and Germany. Unsatisfied by the Serbian reply to its ultimatum, Austria declared war on Serbia. Germany mobilised against ...”

“... They lived for a time in adjacent lodgings. For a week they subsisted on cheese and apples, till Edward, the older man, unexpectedly got a cheque for £25. They had a good meal in a Soho restaurant, crossed the street and sat down to another. Half a bottle of wine could then be had for tenpence. They went on to port in a friend’s room. When they got back ...”

“... that this may now be changing. The most famous Inner Asian of our own times was probably Irving Berlin, and he left at a very early age. Where the Golden Horde has yielded to Alexander’s Ragtime Band why bother about so long ago, so very far away? Of course, such complacency may be premature. The late 20th century turns out to be full of the most unlikely ...”

“... in its broad outlines is by now familiar. In 1926 Melanie Klein, bereft of intellectual support in Berlin after the death of Karl Abraham, accepted Ernest Jones’s invitation (mediated by Alix Strachey) and settled in London, where her ideas gained a sympathetic hearing. When in 1927 Anna Freud published a book on child analysis, it was sharply criticised by ...”

“... All quiet on the euro front? Seen from Berlin, it looks as though the continent is now under control at last, after the macro-financial warfare of the last three years. A new authority, the Troika, is policing the countries that got themselves into trouble; governments are constitutionally bound to the principles of good housekeeping ...”